OUR DIVERSITY IS IN EVERY CELL
by George Wolfe
This year, as a way of preparing for our national holiday commemorating Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I decided to listen to the entire “I have a dream” speech that he delivered on the Washington Mall 50 years ago. Among the many points Dr. King made in that memorable speech are two that deserve special emphasis.
The first point is Dr. King’s insistence that the Black Community meet physical force with “soul force.” This phrase “soul force” Dr. King borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi, which Gandhi referred to as “satyagraha.” Gandhi used this term to characterize the power of a collective moral conscience that is awakened when people have the courage to use nonviolent resistance when standing against injustice. King’s legacy of nonviolent resistance is why we celebrate his birthday. We spend a week honoring Dr. King rather than those in the civil rights struggle who advocated or resorted to violence.
The second point is Dr. King’s call for unity. In the 1960’s, the words Martin Luther King used to describe the divisions in American society were “black and white,” “ Protestant and Catholic,” “Jew and gentile.” He reminded us of the tenets of our Declaration of Independence, that all people “are created equal” and have an inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” He noted that the fulfillment of these tenets depend on the freedom of all Americans, regardless of a person’s religion, national origin or the color of their skin.
We live in a society today where thankfully these dualistic labels no longer adequately represent American culture. Our diversity is becoming increasingly rich, and more and more, people see the value in a multicultural society. Latino, Asian, Native American, African and European peoples are all contributing to the cultural milieu the United States has become. But this diversity is not only around us. It is also within us.
Over the past decade, it has become somewhat popular for people to have their DNA analyzed. In my own family, it was my brother who decided to undergo this analysis. What we discovered is that our family heritage cannot be described so simplistically as German and Scotch-Irish as by brother and I were raised to believe. We are also Jewish, Italian, French, Sub-Saharan African, even Neanderthal. Indeed, all of us, and moreover, all of humanity, came out of Africa.
If we go back far enough, we find we are all related, we are all cousins, and the diversity we celebrate during this Unity Week is not only an external social and cultural diversity. The diversity we celebrate is also within us. It is in each and every cell.
So in this age of science, we can expand Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for unity to embrace a diversity that is much broader and inherent to our humanity than perhaps even Dr. King ever dreamed.
George Wolfe is the Coordinator of Outreach Programs for the Ball State University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies. He also chairs the Muncie Interfaith Fellowship which is a corporation circle in the United Religions Initiative. Wolfe is an ordained interfaith minister, a trained mediator, and the author of The Spiritual Power of Nonviolence: Interfaith Understanding for a Future Without War.